Banga

Patti Smith's new guitar-driven album, her first since 2007's Twelve, is a meditation on exploration and adventure.

Somehow, over the course of the four years it took her to write and record the material on her latest album, Banga, poet-singer-photographer-mother-activist-shaman-clarinetist Patti Smith managed to do some things she hadn't done yet. She acted in a Jean-Luc Godard film, appearing in his 2010 videotape polemic Film Socialisme and, in a highbrow/lowbrow swivel, then later made her television acting debut in an episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent. She wrote her first memoir, Just Kids, a chronicle of her ardent friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe, which earned a National Book Award and critical acclaim. And-- a proud autodidact all her life-- Smith even belatedly racked up a few college degrees, so to speak, receiving honorary doctorates from Rowan University (she dropped out in 1967) and the Pratt Institute. All in all, a pretty average couple of years in the life of Patti Smith, who's spent decade after decade ticking a red pencil against her chin, circling uncharted waters like want ads, and setting sail.

Much like the years during which she was working on it in fits and starts, Banga is a hodgepodge. A song about Amerigo Vespucci comes a few minutes before an elegy for Amy Winehouse; an idyllic ballad inspired by Nikolai Gogol rubs track-list elbows with an idyllic ballad written as a birthday present for Johnny Depp. And all the while Smith scatters handfuls of references to "the future" and "the 21st century" across Banga, suffusing the record with a palpable sense of futurity, horizon-gazing, and, yes, hope. Still, its bright, guitar-driven sound is even-keeled enough to make its motley cast of characters and jumbled, all-over-the-place temporality feel oddly cohesive, as though its parts were carefully fused together in a room where the clock has no hands. Remember those words that shot out of her lips like hot lightning on her brilliant 1978 record Easter: "I don't fuck much with the past, but I fuck plenty with the future." Well, more than three decades later, Banga is the work of someone interested in fucking with everything.

Smith's earliest and most iconic albums were animated by her explosive, dribbling vocal style ("If you miss a beat, make up another," Sam Shepard once advised a nervous Smith before an early theater performance, and everything about her method of singing proves she took those words to heart), but what we've learned over her past few records is that Smith's molten lava delivery has cooled off a bit with age. Which means that the longer, spoken-word pieces on Banga-- the underworld swirl of "Constantine's Dream" or the stoic "Tarkovsky (The Second Stop Is Jupiter)"-- don't careen with the breakneck energy of, say, Horses' centerpiece reveries of "Land, of a Thousand Dances" and "La Mer (De)". Smith's now got one of those speaking voices that-- like Werner Herzog playing God in voiceover-- lends a cosmic gravity to every word she utters, even when she's improvising. This occasionally makes the denser and more conceptual lines feel leaden ("Constantine" begins, "In Arezzo I dreamed a dream/ Of Saint Francis who kneeled and prayed"), but there's something wonderful about the way it's etched certain lingering qualities of her idiosyncratic vocal thumbprint in stone. For all its imagery of Mercury and magpies, I think "Tarkovsky"'s most humanizing charm to be that Smith still pronounces "wuter" with a New Jersey accent.

Banga meditates on ideas about exploration and adventure, and though the longer tracks tackle these themes more explicitly (the 11-minute "Constantine" was inspired, serendipitously, by a postcard she received of a Dimitri Levas painting of a conquistador), it's actually the shorter, less assuming tracks that best capture that spirit of discovery. The opener "Amerigo"-- which reimagines Vespucci taking a more sympathetic view of the indigenous people of his "new" continent-- has an infectiously buoyant energy that doesn't distract from its political consciousness. The same could be said of the driving, scaled-mountain intensity of "Fuji-san", which Smith wrote in the wake of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake in Japan. The elegies-- "This Is the Girl" for Winehouse and "Maria" for the late French actress Maria Schneider-- are sweet, desolate, and fittingly understated. ("It is a song I wish we never had to write," Smith says of "Girl" in the liner notes.) Smith overstates Banga's overarching themes on the final track, a cover of Neil Young's "After the Gold Rush" that's smooth sailing until a small children's choir storms the helm at the end to sing, "Look at mother nature on the run in the 21st century." It's a moment of respite from the somber "Costantine" that precedes it, but-- especially coming from someone as cliché-obliterating as Smith-- it feels uncharacteristically heavy-handed.

Though neither a high point nor a low point in her freewheeling, four-decade career, Banga has the same charm of Smith's best albums: It flits with the impressionistic fascinations of a single mind. Even now that she's got those honorary Ph.Ds, Smith is still the eternal college freshman at heart, constantly stumbling upon new artistic heroes and then drawing from them fathomless and unabashedly ebullient inspiration. Horses tacked upon its walls cut-out, doodled-upon photos of Arthur Rimbaud, William S. Burroughs, and Bob Dylan; Easter subbed them out for Jackson Pollock, Jimi Hendrix, and Jesus Christ; and Banga keeps the cycle going (though with a decidedly Russian flair) with Tarkovsky, Gogol, and Mikhail Bulgakov (the record's title is the name of the dog in Master and Margarita, a book with which Smith says she was "smitten" when she first read it four years ago). Ultimately, it's Banga's earnestness about the thrill of discovery that makes it feel so out-of-time and refreshing. It runs counter to that sense of maxed-out ennui that governs the way so many people talk about art and artists in the age of Wikipedia-- when posturing that you know it all is more attractive than confessing blind spots, if only so you can bemoan the fact that it's all been done before. Though more in spirit than in sound, Banga pulses with the notion that there are still good books we haven't read, old ideas waiting to be fucked with, and new lands we haven't yet explored.